Computing resources such as personal computers (“PCs”) in home and office environments are generally secured against attacks and unauthorized access using a variety of effective security techniques and products. However, computer users today frequently travel outside such environments where they often encounter publicly accessible computers such as those located at kiosks, Internet cafes, or hotel lobbies. Providing security is often a significant challenge for these publicly accessible computers and their users risk data loss, downtime, and loss of productivity should the integrity of the computers be compromised.
Traveling corporate users also often have to forgo the benefits that they normally enjoy in their secure corporate environment when using public computing resources. Currently, publicly accessible computers cannot be managed in the same way as a regular corporate asset which can result in application incompatibility issues, unavailability of needed resources, loss of data integrity, and susceptibility to malicious software for the traveling corporate user. The enterprise network itself also becomes vulnerable to attack and risks being compromised if the corporate user brings malware (i.e., malicious software) back to the office, for example, on a storage medium or if the user e-mails compromised or corrupted files from the public computer back to the enterprise servers.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.